Boy swimmers race against girls in Mass. People not happy

Don't blame the kids .. they just want to swim. Blame the MIAA, which should have come up with a solution to such a problem.

 

You're exactly right. The association needs to fix the problem.

 

For the life of me I cannot understand two concepts:

The need for some people to have their boys compete in any girls sports

The need for some people to have their kids play down age wise in any competitive sport

What do you get out of that?

Seriously - we have an in-house league for our local community youth basketball league but when the girls get to 8th grade there just aren't enough players to have a league. So we create three teams if we are lucky and then to get more games, we play them in the local travel 7th grade league. But we do it because we have rec teams playing against competitive travel teams - so if we didn't move them down, they'd get slaughtered. As it is they don't usually win a game but at least they are in most of the games.

So in that situation fine - but when you go to these AAU Tournaments and you see these teams that are 7th grade teams in the 7th grade league but have three 8th graders - because the rules allow for exceptions - I wonder, really wonder what the hell people are thinking? How does it benefit these kids to play down like that?

 

Because in that case girls are looking for a challenge not an easy win.

 

As I was saying ...

At least you recognize your own ignorance, though. However, I will point out for the record, since you appear not to have noticed this, that girls and boys are different. Different sizes, different body parts, different physical capabilities.

Also girls have cooties.

 

That's crap. They don't have any other choice.

The bottom line is that people hate when boys compete with girls, one way or the other. A few years back, a girl won the state golf title, and I wrote a column ripping the interscholastic association because the girls have their own championship. In the co-ed one, this girl who won played from the women's tees (obviously) but ended up playing 1,500 yards shorter (three average par 5s, as I pointed out) and won by 2 strokes.

It's such a lose-lose situation.

 

She played in the same tournament and played 1,500 yards shorter than her competitors? Is that right? That is so insanely stupid I can't even comprehend it.

 

Either way you want to call it -- girls wrestling boys are not taking on inferior athletes.

Boys swimming in girls events are.

And the girl winning a golf tournament by playing shorter tees is idiotic. If she played from the same tees it would be fine.

 

And this shit is so simple it is ridiculous - swimming is not a team sport in the sense that, if you have a boy who wants to compete - he could still compete in boys events even if his school doesn't have a team. It happens all the time - for god's sakes there are kids here in Western Pennsylvania whose schools don't have a fucking pool yet they compete in the invitationals and then qualify for the districts and state meets.

If the boys at those schools want to swim in dual meets, let them swim with the girls but their times don't count towards records and only qualify them for boys titles

 

I agree with this. In Rhode Island, if your school doesn't offer a sport, up to 3 people are allowed to compete in meets as individuals. I think it applies for swimming, wrestling and track. It can be tough to find individual meets to compete in, so for the most part it normally applies to class and sectionals.

 

We've had some controversy in PA over boys playing on field hockey teams, which is considered a girls sport. Some schools say they will forfeit any competition against a team with a boy on it. The boys said they were simply looking for some competition because boys club teams are few and far between in this country. It was a hot issue a few years ago.

Some smaller schools in the countryside have boys competing on girls volleyball teams in the fall because they don't offer a boys team in the spring. However, the PIAA has championships for both. The boys programs mostly come from suburban areas, while girls programs are common in all parts of the state.

Now, I have seen girls compete for boys diving championships, even for schools that offer both boys and girls swim teams. There was even a girl competing with the boys at a co-ed dual meet and there were those of her gender competing with the girls. I'm pretty sure coaches do this for team points.

 

RI swimming does it right. Most of the elite swimmers compete with club teams, don't practice with their teams and show up to the minimum amount of dual meets allowed to compete in the division and state meet. If your school doesn't have a boys or girls team, you compete as an individual and a couple times during the season they have qualifying meets for individuals so they can compete at states.
The best boys swimmer in the state - he's at USC this year - last year didn't have a team to compete with, then used the state meet as a practice for some national club meet and set two state records.
And to show the greater difference between girls and boys, we had an Olympian - Liz Beisel - who couldn't beat the state's top boys. She would have been close, but didn't have the time these kids did.
When I was in HS, the sport was co-ed. My friend was an All-American and asked me to swim so they'd have enough people for a relay. By the time the season ended I was still the slowest boy but I would have been the third-fastest girl. And I sucked - broke 30 seconds in the 50 once.